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User Stories Applied-For Agile Software Development Mike Cohn. 2004. Addison-Wesley (http://www.awprofessional.com). 268 pages. ISBN 0-321-20568-5
CSQE Body of Knowledge areas: Software Engineering Processes
The traditional waterfall model of the software engineering life cycle (SELC) has been under attack for a long time. Successful methods are rarely subjected to sustained attack, so one can safely assume that something truly is wrong. It used to be called the software crisis, but a crisis is a transitory event. This is more akin to a chronic disease endemic to software development.
Many alternatives have been offered over the last 20 or so years. Barry Boehm offered the Spiral model in 1986, a form of evolutionary prototyping, and various incremental and iterative models have been advanced almost continually in the intervening years. Most recently, the term agile has gained prominence to characterize software methods that promise quicker, better software development without the bureaucratic overload of massive documents that are costly and time consuming to produce. They are rarely read and often obsolete (where they are...